The invention relates to virtual environment systems and more particularly to a method for data handling in a cloud computing environment.
Computer virtualization becomes one of the more important technologies for different sized companies. Computer virtualization increases the computational efficiency and flexibility of a computing hardware platform.
Shared storage is a critical requirement for a virtualized environment. Customers can deploy shared storage using block based storage, such as the iSCSI SAN technology. By leveraging the iSCSI storage protocol, multiple virtual machines (VMs) may access the shared storage. However, if a VM must access multiple times common data on the shared storage, these data will be transferred multiple times through the network from the shared storage. That is, the iSCSI server serves multiple times the same block of shared data to the same VM. The load on this server can be very high.
US Patent 2008/0271017 discloses a method for identifying read-only portions of a file system, sharing the read-only portions among a plurality of virtual machines, and managing the shared read-only portions as a single unit.